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www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 6 | June 2018
InTech
Technical Change or Technical
Revolution, the Customer's Choice
Technological change in the broadcast and media industries has a lot in common with the stock market,
writes Alan Wheable, there are risks and significant gains to be made. And like the stock market,
not everyone actually has to partake...
O
ne thing that everyone always
needs to keep in mind -who
is going to gain and who is going to
lose. The marketing engines of all
organisations, large and small, actively
sell their solutions to their customers
and these customers must decide
whether the solutions on offer work for
them.
Risks and Gains
There are risks and gains if moving
to IP technologies as opposed to
staying with the SDI technologies that
many are familiar with. The choice
must always be with the customer and
ultimately the viewers who help drive
the different technological trends.
Like all businesses, broadcaster and
media organisation need to tread the
fine line between being viable and
profitable today with being viable and
profitable in the future regardless of
the decisions that have been made in
the past and those that will be made
tomorrow.
The broadcast and media industries
have always been dominated by
those organisations who have the
technological edge over its competitor.
As big organisations grow, shrink
and merge, the gaps in the market
that they leave are filled with other
smaller organisations waiting for their
technological opportunity.
At NAB this year is was a bit sad to
see the end of an era for one of the
large technological players, but it
was also refreshing to see the many
thousands of small companies given
the opportunity to grow now that there
is more space to grow.
One of the many challenges
Omnitek Ultra TQ - industry standard T&M
broadcaster and media organisation
have to deal with, is which direction is
the right one to take.
Tomorrow's Choices
As a video and vision design
consultancy and test and measurement
product
manufacturer,
Omnitek
has never dictated the technical
direction that its customers should
take, it discusses with equipment
manufacturers, broadcasters, post
house and others in video and vision,
it respects the choices they make then
offers the solutions to help support
those decisions.
The development of the Ultra family
of test and measurement products is
born out of the needs identified while
talking to customers and this has
culminated in test and measurement
products that have been designed
specifically to meet today's needs of
broadcast and media organisations
without compromising tomorrow's
choices.
Omnitek operates a flexible upgrade
process to accommodate changing
industry needs and workflows and
allow customers to migrate the
functionality of their existing Ultra
products to any other current or future
variant.
Signal Analysis
The Ultra 4K Tool Box, launched
in 2015, has become the industry
standard test and measurement tool
for manufacturers working with 4K,
12G-SDI, quad 3G-SDI as well as 6G-SDI,
HD-SDI and SD-SDI. The Ultra 4K Tool
Box provides a sophisticated package
of physical layer analysis instruments
that are normally only found on highend, high cost oscilloscopes. With
over 500 Ultra 4K Tool Boxes in daily
service with manufacturers around
the world, we can confidently say
that the desire for the early demise
of the humble BNC is not the majority
opinion.
The Ultra XR, launched in 2016,
has become the weapon of choice
in many post production houses
for those wanting to grade and
quality control HD, SDR, 4K and HDR
content. The Ultra XR provides all
the traditional tools needed to work
with DI - high-resolution waveform
display, vectorscope, CIE chart etc. but engineered specifically with 4K/
UHD in mind. The Ultra XR supports
12-bit 4:4:4 SDI input formats in YCbCr
and RGB, along with Wide Colour
Gamut RGB - ITU-R BT.2020 and High
Dynamic Range (HDR) inputs - ST2084
/ PQ and Hybrid Log Gamma. Now with
support for SMPTE 2110 / SMPTE 20226 HD video it is now finding a place in
broadcast IP environments.
Adding Functionality
The Ultra TQ, launched in
2017, supports the analysis
of video over SDI or an
IP link as a SMPTE 2110 /
SMPTE 2022-6 enabled
rasteriser. In addition to
its comprehensive set of
video instruments, the
Ultra TQ has now gained the
ability to analyse and decode Dolby
E, Dolby D and Dolby D+ audio for
monitoring and quality
checking. This 'all-in-one'
Moving towards IP technologies
solution is proving very popular with
broadcasters who are looking to find a
solution for current needs with a 'foot
in the door' for future requirements
and that does not dent the budget.
To allow the decoding of Dolby,
AES/EBU input/output as well as
provide analogue audio monitoring
functionality, a new mezzanine board
has been designed for the Ultra
product range. This board gives the
AES/EBU audio connectivity required
to monitor the de-embed audio from
the SDI/IP stream and decoded Dolby
content. This new audio hardware
is available as a factory upgrade to
existing customers.
We will be continuing to add
functionality and make improvements
to the Ultra family of products
based on feedback from our everincreasing customer base and as the
technological landscape evolves.
Alan Wheable FISTC, MITOL is
the Communications Manager at
Omnitek.
Ultra TQ packs
a comprehensive
suite of tools